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Dear users of the backports service!
With the release of Jessie (coming up) we are pleased to open the doors
for jessie-backports and wheezy-backports-sloppy (mostly all
architectures are already buildable there, too). Whee!
But, PLEASE DO READ ON, there are some changes in the process that we
would like to do for the new upload pockets.
== What to upload where ==
As a reminder, uploads to a release-backports pocket are to be taken
from release + 1, uploads to a release-backports-sloppy pocket are to be
taken from release + 2. Which means:
Source Distribution | Backports Distribution | Sloppy Distribution
---------------------|------------------------|--------------------------
stretch | jessie-backports | wheezy-backports-sloppy
jessie | wheezy-backports | squeeze-backports-sloppy
== We drop -v switch hard requirement ==
We required uploads to contain the changelog entries since the former
version in stable in the changes file. This was quite convenient for
people reading the changes through the changes mailinglist but
especially also for the backports team when processing packages.
Given that the changelogs of former backports and the packages
backported are available through the packages.debian.org website
(amongst other sources) and that it was annoying to both backporters and
also us as backports team we are dropping it as hard requirement. It
would still be pretty awesome for the above mentioned reasons if you
could keep it as part of your workflow, especially for uploads that end
in the policy queue, but we won't reject packages based solely on that
nymore.
== Versioning ==
Previous we used ~bpo70+1 as suffix for the versions of uploads. We
were asked whether we might want to align that with the other suffixes
used and drop the zero from within there, and yes, we will drop it.
This means that uploads to jessie-backports should use ~bpo8+1 as
suffix, and also wheezy-backports-sloppy uses ~bpo7+1 as suffix.
For wheezy-backports please still use ~bpo70+1 version suffixes
because of sorting reasoning, especially if there are also
squeeze-backports-sloppy packages around. Which brings us to ...
== squeeze-backports* ==
As you are probably aware, squeeze is still a supported release through
LTS. The same goes for the squeeze-backports* suites, you can consider
them to be around for the same timeframe that LTS is going to be around.
== Statistics ==
For packages backported from jessie, so far we have 995 different
source packages in wheezy-backports, and 27 different source packages in
squeeze-backports-sloppy. Those 995 source packages took 1729 uploads
to become reality.
== Thanks ==
Thanks have to go out to all people making backports possible, and that
includes up front the backporters themself who do upload the packages,
track and update them on a regular basis, but also the buildd team
making the autobuilding possible and the ftp masters for creating the
suites in the first place.
Enjoy, and continue being awesome!
Rhonda, on behalf of the Backports Team